...of obstinacy

From him, I couldn't take anything the wrong way. I didn't know where or how all this was going to end. He had become my traveling companion, but I couldn't assert that we had everything in common, or else that community would have signified that he had everything in common with me and I nothing with him if we had not clearly tended to have nothing, either one of us. I couldn't attribute bad intentions to him, for he was extraordinarily lacking in intentions. I supposed he was helping me, but I should say his help was such that it left me, more than anything else, at a loss, unfit, and indifferent to being helped in any way, and only a sort of obstinacy permitted me to think that this assistance could be called help and even the greatest possible help. True, I did not always recognise this. I had noted with surprise, with a slight feeling of strangeness, but eventually with discomfort and without surprise, that he was probably lacking enough in intentions to deflect my own, to lead them to the point where they would have to identify with this deflection. I could recall, as an intoxicating navigation, the motion that had more than once driven me toward a goal, toward a land that I did not know and was not trying to reach, and I did not complain that in the end there was neither land nor goal, because, in the meantime, by this very motion, I had lost memory of the land, I had lost it, but I had also gained the possibility of going forward at random, even though, in fact, consigned to this randomness, I had to renounce the hope of ever stopping. The consolation could have been to say to myself: You have renounced foreseeing, not the unforeseeable. But the consolation turned around like a barb: the unforeseeable was none other than the renouncement itself, as though each event, in order to reach me, in that region where we were navigating together, had demanded of me the promise that I would slip out of my story. This, unfortunately, applied to everything and to the most simple things, those with which, at certain moments, I was prepared to be content. I may say that I had the day at my disposal, but on condition that it should not be this day and, even more, that this one should be in part forgotten, should be the sum of forgetfulness.
All else failing, the idea of assigning to him directly the means that he himself had put at my disposal or that had obliged me to have him at my disposal, to make a place for him that I could no longer measure: I would have liked him to give his opinion of such a plan. But to my surprise, he seemed to ignore my question completely. I must point out that, though he rarely spoke about himself, he gave as little impression as possible of neglecting the person speaking to him: he listened in silence, but in such a way that his silences were not inert, though no doubt slightly suffocating, as if they consisted in repeating in a more distant world, repeating exactly, syllable for syllable, everything one was trying to make him understand. At least - and in fact it did happen that his refusal to answer was not a refusal, but contributed to pursuing the conversation, to obliging it to prolong itself beyond all measure, to wear itself down to such a degree, through repetition and obstinacy, that it could only continue and continue on - if he did not answer, he also did not go on to another subject, for in some way he had to content himself with the paths I drew for him, I mean he no doubt felt he had done his duty sufficiently by giving me my cue. For the moment, he did not give it to me; on the contrary, he asked, as though to put me on the wrong track, and after a silence that increased the volume of the question: "Tell me, won't it be winter soon?"

[The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, Blanchot, M.]